The degree of automated handling, feeding and terminating electrical connectors has been ever-increasing in the connector industry to reduce labor costs and to increase speed and reliability of manufacture. However, with a corresponding ever-increasing trend toward miniaturization, difficulties continue to be encountered in handling large numbers of individual electrical connectors or connector components. Automatization, itself, has increased the problems of shipping, storing and automatically handling of such components. Many electrical connectors are manufactured/assembled in stages. Components may be produced, shipped and stored in intermediate assembly stages, and then the components are oriented and fed to automatic or partly automatic terminating machines. Fully assembled electrical connectors then are shipped and stored for ultimate use.
One arrangement for handling electrical connector assemblies or electrical connector components is a high density tray or magazine fabricated of a sheet of formed plastic material. For instance, a thin sheet of polyvinyl chloride is thermal formed or vacuum formed to provide a high density tray for electrical connectors. These types of trays typically include parallel rows of channels or troughs within which the connector components are arranged in end-to-end arrays. The components then can be fed seriatim individually from the individual rows.
The high density trays or magazines often are packaged and shipped in stacked arrays of trays within a packaging container assembly. In essence, present methods for packaging and shipping the connector components include: (1) placing the components into the trays; (2) stacking the trays into cartons; (3) placing the cartons onto a pallet; and (4) wrapping the cartons and the pallet for shipment. When the pallets arrive at a destination point, the procedure is reversed, and the wraps are taken off and the cartons are taken off the pallet. Eventually, the trays are manually removed from the cartons (e.g. cardboard boxes) and placed where they can be accessed by automated machinery (e.g. robot arms) for further processing. Although automated assembly of electrical connectors has reduced labor costs and increased speed and reliability of manufacture, these handling processes are time consuming and labor intensive. For high volume assemblies, the time and the additional labor expense may be substantial.
The present invention is directed to improvements in packaging container assemblies to reduce some of the problems involved in handling electrical connector components for automated processing. The invention is particularly directed to improvements for assuring proper orientation of the electrical connector components within the packaging container assembly.